He was speaking to me in a mosquito’s voice, from an impossible distance: "I speak to you, Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You are not here." Little people shuffled, jabbered, clicked and flashed in the shadow of my headdress. For the thousandth time, I perceived, Tuthmosis had changed his name. Like snake skins or like locusts’ hulls clinging emptily to the barks of trees, his old names polluted history. Now he was "Shaman."
"I’m you," Shaman said. A huge block rumbled and fell from my shoulder. The tourists scattered. "Sanduleak couldn’t hold you, but Earth will. I will. You are not in the Stream, Great One. You are in the desert near Nazlet El-Semman. Gypsy and Nora are the grave robbers, not I. They want to take you back to Gypsy’s galaxy, Abu al-Hawl, but you are so happy in the sand! You are so happy to be my sun, my blood, my radiance, my eternal source! The little brown man in the starship humping Nora is Mel, not you! It’s Mel, and the child he is making in her is a pitiable monster, a monster, Great One, and not the child of your Mind, not the vehicle of your mind seed, not the vessel of your radiance. This was a mirage. I am that. Tuthmosis is that. Shaman is your vessel. I’m you."
I felt heavy, very heavy. I had no desire to move. I was being slowly drained. Perhaps that was good. Perhaps it would lighten me. I scanned the crowd of little people skirting the chunks fractured from the fallen limestone. They were hysterically running east toward the tourist buses. Only one person remained at the site of the ancient stela. With great difficulty I focused on the small man between my paws. He was wearing a T-shirt with my image in day-glo pink, and behind that, the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren in blue. He wore Bermuda shorts and a pith helmet. There was a camera hanging by a thong over one shoulder and a canteen over the other. In one hand he held a shopping bag that said "Nefertiti Bazaar."
Large wraparound sunglasses covered his eyes and part of his forehead and nose. He peeled them from his face, and I saw the brow, one brow arching over both eyes. "Well," he shouted, "it’s been a year, just like I told you, and here I am, Melly-belly. Don’t time fly!"
"Looks like you’ve got a little dandruff there." Izzy scattered slivers of limestone with a playful kick. "And one of us could use a shave. But my cork held, didn’t it, bubeleh, in spite of all the bad-mouthing from various cosmic adventurers I could mention?"
He took a few snapshots of me?Click, flash!?mopped his forehead, downed a swig of water. The suck and gurgle of the water smacking back into the canteen when he pulled it from his lips. The distant murmurs of tourists huddling back as soldiers herded them with batons. Millennia whispering by: sand, wind, sun…
"So, you like it here or what? Sarvadhuka’s going nuts in the novelty shops and brothels. I told him he doesn’t get a disease or induce any pregnancies?Izzovision?so now he’s taken out all the stops, if you’ll excuse the expression. He got so burned when he found out that the Memphis I promised him nooky in wasn’t the one in Tennessee, I felt I had to share some information, to make it up to him.
"I like the weather station on your rump, by the way. Getty Institute, right? No, don’t bother to answer. That’s all right. Don’t exercise yourself, kid. That would really freak the tourists. As if it wasn’t bad enough having a piece of your shoulder fall off and then seeing a lunatic like yours truly gabbing at Old Stoneface here as if he was an old acquaintance.
"You just take it easy. Shaman talks a good game, but he can’t do nothing for a while yet. I’ll come back after nightfall. Me and Sovereign Duchy was just casing the joint thisaft, bagging a few collectibles and that. Don’t say goodbye. Don’t say thank you. Don’t say a thing, Great Abbadabba."
A moustached soldier in khakis and beret with a Kalashnikoff slung over his shoulder grabbed Izzy’s elbow to escort him from the Sphinx enclosure, the hollow I formed about me when I first crash landed on Earth and created human beings, a long, tiring process from the initial joining of nucleotides through the evolution of humans, through whom I could actuate my mental processes, and eventuating in the birth of Tuthmosis IV, on whom I believed I could rely, but consciousness has its own intrinsic imperatives, so here I was, anchored in this blank, vasty shoal, cut off from the stars my home, and utterly dependent on the ministrations of a punch press operator from Lockport, New York.
Somewhere on the wind a mite was buzzing: "I’m you! I’m you!" I felt so tired!
Two
Izzy did not make it back that night. He was being detained, I learned, in an Egyptian hoosegow. Sarvaduhka ran the message over to me. He had to pay one of his Cairo prostitutes one hell of a baksheesh, he said, to guide him, on the back of a camel, through Nazlet El-Semman over to the western funerary complex, and on to the enclosure, my enclosure. Mastaba by mastaba they crept. It gave Sarvaduhka the willies.
Sarvaduhka’s guide was a Coptic Christian, Lila Kodzi, who discoursed on the mysteries of Monophysitism at the most inappropriate moments. Sarvaduhka complained about it. He seemed to think I was God. He told me everything. At the moment of orgasm (Sarvaduhka’s orgasm?she didn’t have them) she would curse the Council of Chalcedon, some fifteen hundred years past, and she would vociferously affirm, in excellent English, the one divine nature of Christ, as Sarvaduhka twitched and spasmed, emitting expletives in three Sanskrit-derived languages.
Sarvaduhka and his shakti huddled at my hindquarters as lights flashed brilliantly on the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren and on my own disintegrating limestone hulk. It was just at the end of the late Friday night sound and light show, the German language one. The show must have been impressive for souls with human bodies and eyes, but all the information was false. As I said, it was I who made Chephren, and not the other way round.
26. What We Can Learn from Linguini
There’s nothing like a few thousand years in the sand to give you a certain sense of perspective. Something deep inside me had loosened up in the millennia since my New Mexico adventure, which, I now understood, preceded the Fourth Dynasty just as much as it followed it. Don’t let the dates fool you.
The people who wrote down the Bible understood this kind of thing. Look and see: Genesis, XIX:3, for example. Lot bakes matzohs?Passover bread?in his house in Sodom. But this was before Moses, before the exodus from Egypt, before Passover started, with the unleavened bread the Children of Israel baked in the sun while the current Pharaoh was saddling horses. Israel (i.e., Jacob) hadn’t even been born yet. So what was Lot doing baking matzohs back in Sodom?
If Izzy has taught me anything at all, it’s that clock time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes five p.m. comes a week or two before six, and sometimes they’re simultaneous. The so-called excluded middle is positively a jungle, teeming with unenumerated possibilities. And causality, so far from being the one-dimensional line that Kant and even Hume talked about, is as wild as linguini on a rolling boil.